ietf-nntp Standardization of LIST OVERVIEW.FMT

[Clive D.W. Feather]

Russ Allbery said:
[re lone CR and LF in article headers]
> Oh, also, I'd really like to leave that in there if possible even if we're
> restricting what can go into the article.  Someday that restriction might
> be lifted in some circumstances or another, and it would be great if
> everyone's overview code, or at least most of it, just worked.  It can be
> a note or a recommendation or something if that works better, but I'd hate
> to not include that hint to implementors since it's easy enough to do.

What I've now got:

    For all fields, the value is processed by first removing all CRLF
    pairs (that is, undoing any folding and removing the terminating
    CRLF) and then replacing each TAB with a single space.  If there
    is no such header in the article, or no such metadata item, or no
    header or item stored in the database for that article, the
    corresponding field MUST be empty.

    Note that, after unfolding, the characters NUL, LF, and CR cannot
    occur in the header of an article offered by a conformant server.
    Nevertheless, servers SHOULD check for these characters and replace
    each one by a single space (so that, for example, CR LF LF TAB will
    become two spaces, since the CR and first LF will be removed by
    the unfolding process).  This will encourage robustness in the face
    of non-conforming data; it is also possible that future versions
    of this specification may permit these characters to appear in
    articles.

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